This month was the annual science night for the Loma Vista 4-H club, marking a special STEM night for learning and education. On November 10, we held our monthly club meeting where Rachel McClanahan and Livia Vertucci invited a special guest speaker to our meeting named Shawn Quien. He is a weatherman for KEYT news in Santa Barbara and a schoolteacher in Oxnard. This was a very great experience, shocking me and my whole family at his utter attention via Zoom, and the ability to convey information quickly and solidly (he is a weather reporter, so that makes sense). Throughout the night he took questions and answered our thoughts on meteorology, tying directly into the activities we had planned for that night.
This highlights one of the important aspects of why I joined 4-H, it sounded exciting to learn from various guest speakers that live in our community. It is enthralling to know the marvellous things that all of our “neighbors” are doing!
Shawn Quien was a man of many trades, as he is a science teacher in the Oxnard School District, and he is a weatherman on the weekends. He conveyed his knowledge on the weather and air pressure. He showed us early air pressure calculators, many of which were in his collection, and he exhibited how they affect the world around us constantly. “Air pressure is the 2nd most important force in this world, other than gravity of course”, was what he said. The learning was all tied into the activities for the night, which included crafting a flying saucer (disc) out of a bottlecap and a CD, and also a straw balloon spinner. These were exhibits of air pressure, a force that Shawn told us would act inside of it’s containment, causing the air to leak out and cause propulsion out of the balloons.
This meeting was a demonstration of how we can persevere and still have great meetings during Covid-19, as it was successful in my eyes and those of others as well. Zoom is a hard place to convey feeling and learning thoroughly, as it is a screen, not a person, but if one can really talk to the people sitting behind their devices, then it is just as great. And I think that this meeting really captured that, may we have more guest speakers like this in the future. Thank you Shawn Quien for being a magnificent guest speaker, through this club’s hard work and dedication to keeping this club great as ever.
-Lucas Malone and Tomás Malone
